NASA's Voyager I space probe—currently 15 billion miles from Earth—is suffering a communication breakdown making it unable to send scientific data or even information about its own health and status back home. It recently "began transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros as if it were 'stuck,'" NASA reports. Fortunately, it's still capable of receiving commands from Earth and executing them. However, the NASA engineers attempted to fix the problem by restarting what appears to be faulty flight data systems, but that didn't do the trick.
From NASA:
It could take several weeks for engineers to develop a new plan to remedy the issue. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, are the two longest-operating spacecraft in history. Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn't anticipate the issues that are arising today. As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft's operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.
In addition, commands from mission controllers on Earth take 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is exploring the outer regions of our solar system more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. That means the engineering team has to wait 45 hours to get a response from Voyager 1 and determine whether a command had the intended outcome.
NASA launched the twin Voyagers 1and 2 in 1977 on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each of these spacecraft is a golden phonograph record containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it, perhaps billions of years from now. This enchanting artifact—the Voyager Golden Record—may be the last vestige of our civilization after we are gone forever.
